“How did you get the tattoo?”
“I just told you.”
“Buddy, you are a dislodged madman. I think the hacks were right. That glue got to you a long time ago.”
“That’s because you got all your wiring tuned in to another radio set,” he said. “And speaking of that, while your high-rolling daddy is about to move it down the road and do his act for the sweater girls and their Howdy Doody boyfriends, let me click on the radio so we can listen to that fine jazz station in Spokane and dig on Shorty’s flügelhorn.”
Buddy turned on the radio that was set in the kitchen window, his trousers unzippered, one-half of his shirt hanging off his back. The tubes warmed in the old plastic box, the static cracked, and when the sound sharpened through the speaker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Mann were actually playing.
Buddy put his arm through the other sleeve, as though he had been in suspension, and then began jiggling all over in rhythm to the music while he buttoned his shirt in his bare feet.
“Tell me, truthfully,” he said. “Were you ever tempted when you were inside? I mean, to just quit fighting it and let the girl have her way?”
Without rising from the chair, I reached over and turned up the radio to full volume and finished the whiskey in my glass. A few minutes later I heard Buddy grind the starter on the Plymouth outside.
After I had showered and put on a soft wool shirt and clean pair of khakis, I saw the pickup truck stop in front of the porch. I opened the door and looked through the screen at Pearl in the blowing snow. She wore a man’s mackinaw with a scarf tied around her head, and her face was red with cold.
“Tell Buddy that—”
“Come in before you turn into a snowman,” I said.
“Just tell him that Frank—”
I opened the screen for her.
“Come in if you want to talk with me. You might not mind freezing, but I do,” I said.
She stepped inside, and I closed the wood door behind her.
“Frank’ll pick him up at six-thirty in the morning to go into Hamilton for some lumber,” she said.
“Oh, he’ll like that.”
“You can do it for him.”
“All right. No problem in that.” I could see she had on only a light shirt under the mackinaw, and she was shaking with the sudden warmth of the room. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“I have to get a loaf of bread up at the store before it closes.”
I took an unopened loaf from the bread box in the cupboard and set it on the table.
“Sit down. A cup of coffee won’t ruin your general feelings towards me.” I washed a cup under the iron pump and filled it from the pot on the stove.
She untied her scarf and shook her hair loose. It was wet with snow on the ends. She picked up the cup with both hands and sipped at the edge.
“Put a little iron it it,” I said, and tipped a capful of whiskey into her coffee. “Where’s Mel tonight?”
“He’s at a faculty meeting.”
“Is he serious about that revolution business?”
“In his way, yes, I guess he is.”
“What do you mean ‘in his way’?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said.
“I’ve had some experience with people who are always trying to right the world by wiping out large portions of it. They all have the same idea about sacrifices, but it’s always somebody else’s ass that gets burned.”
“Mel’s a good man,” she said, and looked at me flatly.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t. I didn’t say anything about him. I just asked a question.”
“He believes in idealistic things. He wasn’t in a war like you, and he doesn’t have your cynicism about things.”
I took a good hit out of the bottle on that one.
“You know, I think you’re a crazy woman and you belong in a crazy house,” I said. “The next time I get drafted into one of Uncle Sam’s shooting capers, I’ll write the draft board and tell them I’d rather opt out because I don’t want to come home with any cynical feelings.”
“Let me ask you a question. Do you feel anything at all about taking from everything around you no matter what it costs other people who have nothing to do with your life?”
I walked in my socks to the stove and poured more coffee and a flash of whiskey in her cup and sat back down. She had pulled back her mackinaw, and her breasts were stiff against her shirt as she breathed. Her full thighs were tight inside her blue jeans and spread open indifferently on the corner of the chair. I had to hold the anger down in my chest, and at the same time she disturbed me sexually.
“Let me hang this one on you, Pearl, and you can do with it what you want to,” I said. “I didn’t take anything from anybody, and any problem they have isn’t of my making. It was already there.”
She moved herself slightly in the chair, just enough so that her thighs widened an inch and her buttocks flattened.
“That must be a convenient way to think,” she said.
“It’s better than that. It’s the truth. And I don’t like anyone trying to make me take somebody else’s fall.”
“That must be some of your prison terminology.”
“You better believe it is. I paid my dues, and straight people don’t con a con.” I felt my heart beating and my words start to run away with themselves.
“Maybe all people don’t behave toward one another with a frame of reference they learned in jail.”
“Well, the next time you want to talk about people’s problems, come down here again and I’ll help you solve a couple of yours.”
She didn’t say anything. She just buttoned up her mackinaw, tied her scarf around her damp hair with the remote manner of a lady leaving a distasteful situation, and walked out the door to the truck. She left the door open, and the wind drove the snow into the room.
I didn’t even bother to shut it for ten minutes. I felt a red anger at myself for my loss of control that left me trembling. Talk about a con not being conned, I thought. You are a fish who just got conned into thinking he was a con who could not be conned. And for somebody who thought he had touched all the bases over the years, this was no mean thing to consider.
The two weeks finally passed, and it was a bright, cold day with the snow banked high on the lawns in Missoula when I knocked on Beth’s door. The boys were at school, and we made love on the couch, in her bed, and finally, in a last heated moment, on the floor. Her soft stomach and large, white breasts seemed to burn with her blood, and when she pressed her hands into the small of my back, I felt the fifteen days in jail and the two weeks of aching early morning hours drain away as in a dream.
Each morning I helped Mr. Riordan put in the stall partitions in the barn and feed the birds in the aviary; then after lunch I hitched a ride or flagged down the bus into Missoula. Beth and I whitefished in the broken ice along the banks of the Clark, a fire of driftwood roaring in the wind with the coffeepot set among the coals. We ate bleeding steaks by the stone fireplace in the German restaurant and explored ghost towns and mining camps up logging roads and drainages where the trees rang with the tangle of ice in their limbs. I had forgotten how fine it was to simply be with someone you love.
We drove up a graded log road off Rock Creek, high up the side of the mountain, to a mining camp that had been abandoned in the 1870s. The cabins were still there along the frozen creek, where they used to mine placer gold that washed down from the mother lode, and the old sluices and rocker boxes were covered with undergrowth, the rusted square nails and bits of chain encased in ice. But if you blinked for just a minute, and let your imagination have its way, you could almost see those old-timers of a century ago bent sweatily into their futile dream of a Comstock or Alder Gulch or Tombstone. They always knew that wealth and the fulfillment of American promise was in that next shovel-load of sand.